NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

He checked into a London hotel, and from there he called and sent e-mails to the companies. Rugasira is a tall, tireless 43-year-old with an angular face and slightly prominent ears and a smile that rearranges everything. Armed with a laptop that held a PowerPoint presentation about his coffee, he intended to pull off a kind of revolution. No longer would his country merely sell its unroasted beans to exporters who supplied the European and American coffee kings, from Nestlé to Starbucks; no longer would his nation just provide the raw material for someone else’s riches. In the stores, his roasts would take their place beside the high-end brands.

He was bursting with the pitch he would deliver as soon as he met his first British buyer. “We as a new generation of African entrepreneurs believe that we can bring quality products to the global market. We believe we have what the consumer in the North Atlantic market is looking for in coffee; we believe we have the capacity to design the packaging to make it attractive; we believe. . . .” As he recalled the speech he prepared — while we sat in December outside his little purchasing office in Kasese, a town not far from the Democratic Republic of Congo — he sounded like the most moving of preachers. And he felt poised, he said, on that trip to London in 2004, to convert the Western world to his product. In his hotel room, he sat dressed in beige slacks and a gray turtleneck, with a blue blazer pressed and waiting. He watched for replies to animate his in-box. None came. On the phone, the receptionists wouldn’t put him through. The 4,000 miles he traveled didn’t seem to soften them. “Did you send a message?” they asked. “Well, then he’ll get back to you.” No one did. Day after day, his sermon went unspoken. And at last, there was nothing to do but go home.

Yet Rugasira has a resilience that may have been forged in childhood. He grew up in Kampala during the terrors of Idi Amin’s reign in the ’70s. When he was around 11, with Amin just driven out, soldiers climbed over the gate in front of his family’s house and carried away the TV, the refrigerator, the furniture, while Rugasira and two of his sisters, who were 7 and 5, huddled on their knees and prayed in a bedroom. He could hear the soldiers threatening and his parents pleading out front. The gunmen left, but one evening, his father, who owned a factory that made chalk for Ugandan schoolchildren, didn’t return home.

Imprisonment and exile in Kenya — this was his father’s life for the next two and a half years, yet when I asked Rugasira how that period of his boyhood affected him, he said flatly that it hadn’t. “Context is so important,” he said. “Friends were losing their parents. If you were successful, you were accused of being Amin’s agent. It wasn’t difficult to figure out that I was fortunate to be alive, to have my parents alive.” He didn’t want to dwell on that time. He was far happier talking about the “value addition” achieved by the growers on the rugged hills above Kasese, through a technique of processing beans that his staff taught them. Or talking about “capturing the entire value chain” through his quest to build a roasting factory in Kampala, offering perhaps the first African-roasted coffee sold in British and American stores and creating a thriving industry in sub-Saharan Africa, where factories of any kind are scarce and where the export of finished products to the West is nearly nonexistent.